“Group-think where contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked

This looks like big trouble in the Warministas ABC diocese to this humble correspondent, with the guardians of the one true faith putting up a spirited argument against any mention of the anti-AGW heresy within the walls of our dear Auntie:

Maurice Newman

Describing himself as an agnostic on climate change, Mr Newman said climate change was an example “of group-think where contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked”.

He warned ABC staffers that he would not tolerate anyone suppressing information, citing the fact that a BBC science correspondent knew for a month before the scandal broke of damaging emails at the University of East Anglia in Britain highlighting the politicised nature of climate science but did not report them.

Mr Newman said the Guardian newspaper had noted that the moment climatology is sheltered from dispute, its force begins to wane.

“Which raises an important question for a media organisation,” Mr Newman said in the speech obtained by The Australian. “Who, if anyone, decides what to shelter from dispute? And when?

“Should there be a view that the ABC was sheltering particular beliefs from scrutiny, or failing to question a consensus, I would consider it to be a dangerous perception that could lead to the public’s trust in us being undermined.”

Sources said the speech drew an immediate rebuke from the ABC’s Media Watch presenter Jonathan Holmes, who rose to his feet and said he was angered by Mr Newman’s remarks.

Sources said Holmes had told Mr Newman he was wrong to assert that sceptics were silenced on the ABC. Holmes declined to comment when contacted by The Australian.

ABC science journalist Bernie Hobbs also spoke, supporting Holmes’s view and saying the ABC could not give undue weight to the sceptics and thereby push a sceptics’ agenda.

Ah this is what happens when you get true believers at the helm of our national broadcaster who think that instead of reporting the developments in science think that they should control the direction of  the debate to propagate their own beliefs rather than just keep the public informed as their charter requires.

Cheers Comrades

A very loving and caring nurse?

Call me simple if you like but I just can’t see that this case is of necessity a breach of professional ethics.

A NURSE was fired from a UK hospital after bedding grieving husbands of deceased cancer-stricken wives she had cared for, reports say.

Sara Dale, 39, allegedly had three such romances with men she had met through her job at Queen Elizabeth National Health Service Hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

Their terminally ill wives were being treated there and after they died she embarked on relationships with the grieving widowers, The Sun reports.

The nurse, who worked for UK cancer support charity Macmillans, was fired from the hospital and “debadged” by the group.

She currently lives in South Wootton, Norfolk with Stephen Ellis, 50, whose long-term partner Mel died of cancer last year.

I understand that we believe that we quite rightly frown upon medical practitioners forming sexual liaisons with their patients but is it really that bad for a nurse to form a relationship with a family member of one of her late  patients?

Grieving makes for strange bedfellows indeed.
Cheers Comrades

Cheesed off or breast is best, well maybe

About fifteen years ago I used to do herd testing which entailed me going out to various dairy farms measuring the milk output of the cows and taking samples from each cow to test for protein, fat and the somatic cell count. It was hardly the best job that I have ever had and my wife hated it, Mainly because I would come home smelling of well, bovine excrement. Sorry but this story brought a rather different image to mind and one that is probably better left in the dark recesses of my imagination.

You would need an awful lot of breast milk to make some cheese out of it

A CHEF at a trendy New York bistro is letting diners munch on cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

The New York Post reported today Daniel Angerer, who runs Klee Brasserie in the city’s Chelsea neighbourhood, said customers started demanding his custom-made “human cheese” after he blogged about his efforts to make it.

“The phone was ringing off the hook,” the chef explained. “So I prepared a little canape of breast milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper.”

“It tastes like cow’s milk cheese, kind of sweet,” he added, noting that the flavour depends on what the cheese is served with and “what the mother eats.”

The response among those who tried the cheese was described as generally positive, although many customers were too squeamish to attempt it.

I would love to know if my readers would eat this sort of cheese or not personally I would decline the offer….
after all I’m out of crackers and it is hardly Wenslysdale now is it?
Cheers Comrades

Driver lacked razor-sharp focus

Regular readers may recall that I copped a bit of flak about a previous post that pointed out that tweeting while at the wheel may be dangerous, well this story makes that look a trivial and rather safe practice by comparison.

click image

As authorities nationwide warn motorists of the dangers of driving while texting, Florida Keys law enforcement officers add a new caution: Don’t try to shave your privates, either.

Florida Highway Patrol troopers say a two-vehicle crash Tuesday at Mile Marker 21 on Cudjoe Key was caused by a 37-year-old woman driver who was shaving her bikini area while her ex-husband took the wheel from the passenger seat.

“She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit,” Trooper Gary Dunick said. “If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have believed it. About 10 years ago I stopped a guy in the exact same spot … who had three or four syringes sticking out of his arm. It was just surreal and I thought, ‘Nothing will ever beat this.’ Well, this takes it.”

If that weren’t enough, Megan Mariah Barnes was not supposed to be driving and her 1995 Ford Thunderbird was not supposed to be on the road.

The day before the wreck, Barnes was convicted in an Upper Keys court of DUI with a prior and driving with a suspended license, said Monroe County Assistant State Attorney Colleen Dunne. Barnes was ordered to impound her car, and her driver’s license was revoked for five years, after which time she must have a Breathalyzer ignition interlock device on any vehicle she drives, Dunne said. Barnes also was sentenced to nine months’ probation.

Cheers Comrades
R

The modern gleaners

In our consumer society the endless cycle of product replacement in our homes is not so likely to be driven by the need to replace an item as it is by the desire to replace. The net result is that perfectly usable items are thrown away.

STREET SAVVY: Students Ronnie Lawton and Craig Spletter with their haul. Nathan Richter Source: The Courier-Mail

FOR many Brisbane students, scavenging is the new eBay. Cash-strapped uni students unable to afford new furniture are turning to kerbside collection piles to furnish their homes.

Residents around Brisbane’s northside have been putting out piles of unwanted furniture, whitegoods and general rubbish for the council to collect as part of its biennial kerbside large items collection service.

But council workers may find little left to collect, with roadsides acting as a kind of underground bazaar.

Exercise science student Alex Eviston, 20, recently found a working microwave and a couch and said he doubted their former owners would mind.

As a commentator to the article points out it is not just students who manage to glean some treasures from this practice and I was amused to note that the Council up here is actually unperturbed by people gleaning treasures from this trash:

A Brisbane City Council spokesman said the council had not received any complaints about this particular form of clandestine furniture shopping.

“People can basically take what’s left,” he said.

“Households are leaving things out the front and whether students take it or others take it isn’t our concern. Council’s job is really just to collect what’s left on collection day.”

This is a somewhat more enlightened attitude than I noted when I last mentioned the road side collections in a previous post at this blog , Oh hang on that was about the deep south where they are rather less enlightend than we are up here

Cheers Comrades

PS Maybe Socky could get some of the things he needs this way  to refurnish his home after his recent disaster , anyway  to help him along I am going to double what I pay him for his pieces here, that way he might just be able to afford to  get the old steam powered computer ( a commodore 64) working rather than use the public library computer  to post his extraordinary insights into life the universe and every thing.

Why are ‘Wild Saturday’ victims being ignored?

My home, a victim of 'Wild Saturday' - Where are all the donations now you pricks????

On the Saturday of the 7th Febuary 2009 the Black Saturday bushfires took a hold on the State of Victoria (the place to be? My arse!!) and destroyed over 2,000 homes and took nearly 200 lives. Aussies world-wide like Mel Gibson, Kylee Minogue, Nickoff Kidman & Greg ‘I think with my dick’ Norman gave generously (as did the ordinary folks) and John Brumby collected over $300 million to hand out to the victims and gave them all free trips to Disneyland and the footy. This was called Black saturday and the whole world knew about it and went out of their way and took out loans to give mega-bucks to lend a helping hand to the poor buggers that got burned.

Now, On Saturday the 6th March 2010 the Wild Saturday storm of the century swept acoss the metropolis and cosmapolitan Melbourne destroying hundreds of thousand of homes – and even causing the Flemington races to arbandoned - But what did we the victims of this catastrophey get for all our pain and suffring?

I’ll tell you what we got … F*CK ALL!

Where are all the bleeding heart do-goodies this time, eh? Have youse got no compashen for your fellow man? Look at my f*cking home! And I don’t have any insurance !!!!!

Just give up one latte a day for the next month is all I ask. Give – until it hurts.

I demand an enquiry into this Mr Brumby.

Same Rudd-time, Same Rudd-Channel

I have been rather quiet on the health reform proposals from Brother Number One mainly because I wanted to get some grasp of the detail and now that I have done that I just can’t help hearing the Batman theme running through my head.

NSW Premier Kristina Keneally is leading state defiance against Kevin Rudd’s proposed health funding reform, refusing to sign up to the plan before seeing details of the Henry tax review.

Ms Keneally today expressed surprise at Kevin Rudd’s hardball attitude towards the states over their reluctance to sign up to his plan to seize 30 per cent of state GST revenues to bankroll the move.

“We very much want to understand how the taking (of) one third of the GST and putting it directly towards health, how does that effect the rest of the tax system?” she said on Macquarie Radio.

“I mean the GST is a pretty efficient tax. Right now the Commonwealth has a review of the entire tax system going on, the Henry tax review.

“They may well be making other changes to the tax system this year. We want to understand what those are before we sign up to … directing one third of our GST towards one portfolio area.”

It seems to me that what is being proposed is most unlikely to come to fruition. In the first instance because the states won’t just sign a blank cheques for this scheme and secondly a referendum to force the states to comply is hardly likely to even get on the ballot paper. (Does it require an act of parliament to do so? if it does the senate would block it) But even if it were to get up just how is it going to make a scrap of difference among the blood and bandages?
Brother Number One has talked really big on climate and failed.
He has talked really big about an “Eduction revolution” and produced only the most limited results
He has taken responsibility to the disastrous insulation scheme, and the myriad other failed grand schemes.
And like the TV show alluded to in the you tube we will have to stay tuned at the same bat-time and on the same bat-channel to see the next episode of of this comic book adventure.
The only unanswered question is what character will our beloved Brother Number One be playing?
The Penguin? No that is more apt for the climate change episode
The Riddler? Don’t think so he is not quite witty enough to pull that one off, even with a good script writer.
It must be the Joker because he must be joking if he thinks the the states will accept the commonwealth taking back one third of the GST revenues to pay for it. Or that the Australian people will accept an increase in the rate of the GST either

Until the next bat-time Comrades

The story of an O, or Belinda Neal. will she be missed?

The next time Belinda Neal asks a waitress “do you know who I am?” the waitress can have a very good laugh indeed.

Will she be missed?

CONTROVERSAL Labor MP Belinda Neal has lost a pre-selection vote to contest her seat of Robertson on the NSW Central Coast at the next federal election.

University lecturer and local resident Debora O’Neill thumped the incumbent by an unofficial vote of 98 to 67.

With any political office comes a necessity for personal humility and it is no surprise that this most arrogant and objectionable woman has been given the arse from preselection in the seat of Robertson. I do find it mildly amusing that here replacement is an “O’Neill”, nice to see that the hot bed of nepotism that is the ALP is sort of keeping it in the family.
Cheers Comrades

we have to buy halal because we have some Muslim children in the school”.

This story is a typical example of , probably well meaning, political correctness enthusiasts making public institutions like our schools compliant with Islamic dietary dogma even though Muslims are only a tiny proportion of the school population.By their logic perhaps they should be making all  school barbecues vegetarian affairs because they surely have some vegetarian students, Oh hang on, perhaps they should just stop barbecues altogether because they might have some Anorexic students and they don’t want to offend them by offering anything that is like , gasp, food…

Members of the school’s Parents and Friends Association believed they were being inclusive when they ordered halal-only sausages for last month’s barbie.

But some parents thought it was political correctness gone mad to offer only halal meat.

Parent Diane Rees said yesterday that she was outraged when told by the PFA that “we have to buy halal because we have some Muslim children in the school”.

“I said to the principal, ‘I think you’re discriminating against the majority of the school and appeasing the minority by only serving halal,’ ” she said. “It’s not fair on my children that they can’t eat at the school.”
Ms Rees said she wasn’t anti-Muslim – her concern was over the way animals were killed under the halal method, which involves a knife cut to the jugular veins and carotid arteries in the neck.

“They take two long minutes to die and I think that’s bloody cruel,” she said.

But Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Ikebal Patel said research showed that, done properly, halal was a quick and humane slaughter of animals.

“I think they are using the issue of some halal sausages at a barbecue, for God’s sake, to bring out their own xenophobic bigotry,” he said.

“It was very thoughtful of the parents and friends association to try to cater for Muslims. I think they (the critics) need to get real and get a life on this one.”

School principal David Kilmartin, who has been in the job for only a month, said halal-only barbecues were not school policy and the PFA had been told to provide a choice of meat in the future.

“I don’t think it was done with any malice. I’m assuming there would have been requests from Muslim families to have halal meat,” he said.

Although I have previously expressed concern about the place of ritual slaughter in the preparation of meat I firmly believe that every one should follow their conscience and their taste when it comes to what they eat, but any group of people who seek to impose a set of dietary rules from a religion upon people who do not share that faith are doing no service to that faith or their followers.

After all who has ever heard of a halal pork sausage?

Cheers Comrades

Let them eat sand, or the futility of aid

We have all seen the may instances of hunger and suffering in Africa on our screens and in our newspapers. We have all been moved by the images of children gaunt and starving and we have all been tempted to give money to alleviate the suffering that we have seen in those plaintive eyes.

Outlining in detail how his organisation managed to trick NGOs and to steal millions in money and food, he said he posed as a Muslim merchant to secure the trust of the authorities.

When the NGOs wanted to check on whether the food was being processed and organised to be distributed into regions, Mr Araya would show them warehouses full of sacks stacked on top of each other. “We showed them huge amounts of grains, quintiles of grain. But if you go there, half of the warehouse is stacked full of sand,” he said. “It is not grain, it is sand that was collected from the river, the Tekeze River. We tricked them as well as possible.”

The revelations have sparked a typical Geldof outburst, with the Irish rocker telling The Times of London it would be a “f . . king tragedy” if the revelations stopped people giving to charity.

I am entirely unsurprised by this revelation and my cynicism about the giving of aid to Africa is sadly not  something new. I was saying at the time of Bob Geldof’s Live Aid party piece that I did not think that it would ultimately make that much difference, that any largess would largely be used to enrich the corrupt governments and the battling war lords of that ravished continent. Geldof to his credit did try very hard to bypass the corrupt in his desire to help the needy but revelations such as this one show that perhaps the corruption  and greed of those in power is altogether too pervasive and that the lives of the poor and the hungry of Africa mean so little to their fellow Africans that any attempts from outsiders to end hunger on that continent are bound to fail.

Geldof does however suggest the moral question that we should consider here , namely if all but a very small part of the aid that is pumped into Africa is diverted from its intended purpose should we in the “wealthy” west continue to give?

What percentage of “aid siphoning” should we endure for the greater good? 5%?  or 10%? or  50%? maybe  75%? or even  99%?

Cue my resident lefty  dogooder Damian Doyle

Cheers Comrades

8)

Scanner Refuseniks; fly or no fly?

There is just a touch of irony in this story. Scanners are necessary because of the threat posed to air travel by various jihadist conspirators.

Naked scan: A Manchester Airport employee tests the scanner, with suspicious substances in his pockets that show up as a dark colour identified in the red squares

Two Muslim women have become the first passengers to refuse to subject themselves to controversial ‘naked’ full body airport scans, it emerged today.

The pair – who security officials insist were selected at random – opted to miss their flight to Pakistan and forfeit tickets worth £400 each rather than be screened.

One of the women refused to go through the full-body scanner at Manchester Airport on religious grounds while her companion also declined for ‘medical reasons’.

The women were travelling together to Islamabad when they were selected to pass through the controversial security screen after checking-in at Terminal Two at the airport.

An estimated 15,000 people have already passed through the scanners, with the pair the first passengers to refuse a scan.

I am curious to hear what my readers think about this and to know if you think that not allowing scanner refuseniks to fly is reasonable.

Cheers Comrades

No sex please, we’re NSW police

“Can’t we just f***? I am a 19-year-old girl, what is wrong with you?” 

Would you say no?

This poor girl just wanted a root, so she joined the police force where she thought she might find some real men who would give her one or two (hundred).

What is wrong with that? What is wrong with NSW coppers, are they all gay?

This story speaks for itself  and I am almost speechless that this girl was knocked back again & again. Then they sacked her!

She should try Melbourne where there are lots of desperate men who would not say no to a head job in a dunny. 

A POLICE officer who was sacked after begging colleagues for sex has lost her unfair dismissal claim.

Within days of being posted Jessica Parfrey propositioned her supervisor to have an affair because “everyone knows you’re supposed to fall in love with your buddy”.

A month later, after he turned her down, she told him: “Can’t we just f***? I am a 19-year-old girl, what is wrong with you?”

The Industrial Relations Commission in Sydney heard that Ms Parfrey also offered an officer oral sex in a pub toilet and carpark and later propositioned another, saying: “I know you want me.”

Both men refused.

She tried to call another colleague 12 times, left six text messages and then offered to help him study for his police exams by stripping off an item of clothing for every question he got correct. He refused.

Ms Parfrey was sacked from the police in September 2007, five months into her probation.

Nothing more to say.

Lara “Moriarty” Bingle????

If you are an avid fan of “whodunits” like I am you may be familiar with the idea that if you follow the money trail then you will find the answer to the mystery.

/ The Daily Telegraph

AS Lara Bingle prepared to cash in on a magazine bidding war for her side of the nude photo scandal, Brendan Fevola has told his side to the AFL – that the picture was taken on a pre-paid mobile phone that disappeared long ago.

The Courier-Mail has learnt this is the explanation Fevola provided for how a nude photo of Bingle he took had been circulated around the AFL before ending up in Woman’s Day on Monday.

Fevola spent yesterday shooting the AFL’s latest TV commercial, which suggests the league aren’t prepared to hang him just yet.

It is also understood Bingle will be paid about $200,000 for a story that has the capacity to rock the AFL and engulf Fevola and the Brisbane Lions in a fresh storm of controversy.

But it also renders obsolete her threat of legal action against Fevola.

Following the money trail here suggests to me that the person who “did it ” here is most likely to be Lara Bingle herself  for if the reports that she is likely to be paid 200 grand for the rather trite shot then it represents a pretty good stipend for a rather dull image. As I said in my previous post she has revealed almost as much in other photos on many occasions. But its not just the immediate cash that points to Bingle here it is the benefit that playing the outraged victim of male evil could have on her flagging modeling “career”. And if she is still actually bitter over her adulterous affair with Favola then she also gets the dubious benefit of seeing him have to defend his professional career as a pig skin chaser.

All in all I can see no other individual who has more to gain from this bruhaha than Bingle herself and motive is everything in a case like this so I will be paying  a little attention to see how it plays out but make no mistake what we are seeing here is almost certainly a put up job.

Elementary my  dear  Comrades

How to beat the boom and get into your first home for nicks

“Home loans up by an average of $50 a month after rise in interest rates” say the headlines in all Australian newspapers today. But not for me.

I have just moved into my new home at Blue Gums Caravan Park here in Melbourne, close to the beach too. It’s not far from that upmarket Patterson Lakes (as seen in the brillient TV series Kath & Kim) where ‘knobs’ pay anything up to $1million and more for a McDonald’s McMansion, which I find strange cos I would not want to live in a takeaway food store. Here is my new home a 30-footer:

The way of the future. (Left click on this photo to make it bigger)

Now you will be asking me how did I manage to buy such a luxuriush home for nicks and beat the banks and the property boom? It’s all thanks to Norm the park owner who clevurly put the paperwork together. Norm put the price down as $14,000 and got all the money for me from the first home buyer’s grant using the name of a dead person. Norm says the van is only worth $7,000 (ha, ha, it’s worth ten times that!) so he will keep the whole $14,000 and that will also cover my site fees for 12 months. Next year Norm will just move my van to a new site in the park and we’ll do the whole thing again under another dead kid’s name.

So I have got a clear title to my home while all the knobs down the road struggle with their $3,000 plus per month mortgages on their Mc Donald’s McMansions. I’m larfing. Youse should get on to this, it is the way of the future for all young homebuyers, old age pensioners and derelicks.

(I’m saving my dole money for a porta loo and an extension to the van, which I will build as soon as I can find some decent canvas sail-cloth that some knob from Patterson Lakes has thrown out at the local tip cos it’s “not the right colour”)

Lara Bingle, tits out writs in

Lara Bingle

Call me a cynic but this whole bruhaha strikes me as being some sort of publicity stunt intended to reignite Ms Bingle’s flagging career after all who cares about a rather bad mobile photo of the lady with , surprise surprise, her kit off? The photo above shows just as much as the picture in question .

Nude photo ... Lara Bingle is reportedly set to sue Brendan Fevola Photo: Paul Harris and Helen Nezdropa

Nicholas Pullen, a partner at TressCox lawyers, said Bingle would struggle to sue Fevola successfully unless she could prove he (Fevola)provided the photograph to Woman’s Day.

‘‘Bingle would have to prove [the photograph] came from Fevola and then she would have to prove when Fevola sent it off; the reasonable person would expect it to end up in Woman’s Day,’’ Mr Pullen said.

He said succeeding with a defamation claim would also be difficult.

‘‘The next step in any defamation formula is: how is it making people think less of Lara Bingle than they already do. Well, she’s coming off a low base on that one.

‘‘In the version of the photograph I have seen, it doesn’t look like you are seeing terribly much more of Lara Bingle than you have already seen.

‘‘It would be a bit different if we were looking at a photograph of the Governor-General. So I think you can pretty well safely strike defamation off.’’

Mr Pullen said a claim for misuse of the model’s image would only be relevant if the photo was used to sell something.

‘‘That only comes into play if the photograph was being used to sell toothpaste or soap, for example,’’ he said.

‘‘Misuse is a term for merchandising, commercialising one’s image. This is clearly not the case.’’

If the Legal opinion above is correct  then issuing a writ that has no chance of success just has to be about things other than seeking legal redress. But just goes to show that being involved in transient sexual relationships is not always such a good idea no matter how hip and cool that you think you are ,Oh yeah It also shows that those fancy Mobile devices that do everything,  short of removing boy scouts from horses hooves, are not such a grand idea.

The law suit will, I expect, quietly go away once its maximum  publicity potential for Ms Bingle has been reached.

Cheers Comrades